Practising democracy to make better futures: A Pragmatist perspective

It is inevitable that as global connectedness increases, so too do the differences that invite political responses. The ever mounting complexities of climate change, migration, war, and inequitable access to resources are, as the Workshop Convenors suggest, “kicking off everywhere”, requiring us as researchers to rethink how we might more productively respond to these challenges. Faced with a world in perpetual motion, it seems that we ourselves need to become more dynamic by pursuing a nomadic approach to our inquiries, which as Deleuze and Guattari argue, provides a backdrop that fills in the more subtle details behind the grand (and dualistic) abstractions of Royal science. This, in turn, requires us to ease our dependence on static categories such as who can/can’t exercise political power, and shift attention to a more temporal understanding of power as an emergent social process.
In this Symposium, we intend to explore the potential for American Pragmatism to inform exactly this type of dynamic engagement. In particular, we draw on Pragmatism’s deep commitment to democracy, not as a representative exercise, but as a form of engaged community activism that is always directed towards making better futures. Our primary informants are Jane Addams, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead and Mary Parker Follett, all of whom emphasize the importance of education, ethics and dialogue for effective participatory democracy. They also insist that their ideas need to be developed in practical situations rather than as metaphysical musings. Accordingly, our exploration of Pragmatist democracy
will be situated within the multi-stake problematics of building and operating windfarms to generate environmentally sustainable electrical power.